This blog has been jolted, or should it be prodded, back to life by the unstinted efforts of 2 fine friends – Ravi and Warrier. Thanks guys.

And as a tribute to them and some of the nice friends with whom I have had healthy project discussions on cricket, er..well that is healthy discussions on cricket under the pretext of project meetings, I thought the first cry on rebirth of this blog could be reminiscing a bit,  a stroll or two down the memory lane, what?

What prompted this toddling along the memory lanes is the awful feeling you get when you are surrounded by a bunch of EPL T-shirt wearing representatives of the younger generation who, even when they have absolutely no business in doing so, don’t have any reservations about passing comments on cricketers and cricket matches. It does give you a rude jolt when you find cricinfo scorecards peering at you from their monitors. Don’t get me wrong. I have the highest respect for anyone who uses office resources to follow any sport, even if it is a World Championship of ‘kuttiyum koalum’. There is nothing like sitting in cozy air-conditioned offices of the company and contributing your bit to make sure that not even an iota of the data link bandwidth goes wasted.  After all, the company is paying money for the internet connection and you have to show some semblance of loyalty by utilising it to the maximum. Maximum Utilization is a wonderful term I picked up from my Industrial Engineering graduation days. Nice one that. Can be used to hoodwink your boss or even the client sometimes, though nowadays ‘effective utilization of resources’ seems be have gained upperhand. I am digressing.

So back to the subject of the woeful, or is it awful, time I have been having of late surrounded by these specimens who incessantly talk about the transfer of some thotti. Baffled me a bit, you know. Then the huge TV screen in the pantry, in all its kindness and benevolence beamed an image of a guy running around a soccer ground with the word Totti plastered across his T-shirt. Enlightenment. I felt like Buddha under the Bhodi tree. Reminded me of the time some 15 years back, when my mother excitedly told my sister who had just got back home from college that Shanti’s father is not her real father. The plate fell from my hand and the dosa went tumbling into the stainless steel container which was carrying the day’s sambar. What the hell, I thought. Not in our neighbourhood, they are a decent family. But the juicyness of the information helped me overcome the grief of losing a crisp dosa to the depths of Sambar. I was about to embark on an interrogation of my mother to get more of the interesting news, when I was struck by the non-chalance of my sister. No shock, no expression of horror. Just a mild curiosity on her face. Did they show who it is then?, she asked. Show? show where? it’s surely not on the national news, I asked. My sister threw me a glance that seemed to suggest that I am the most pitiable creature on earth. Don’t imagine juicy stories, we are talking about the serial. Aha. The same Budha under the Bodhi tree feeling.

I am digressing again. So, as I was saying, the excruciating circumstances left me pining for those wonderful days back in 2000-2001 when all my team members would assemble in my cabin and we would have very productive project discussions on why S Ramesh should be persisted with even after a couple of failures and why W D Balaji Rao, he of the sledging-Steve-Waugh-in-a-tour-game fame, could be tried for a test match. By dint of some extremely fortunate circumstances I had some sort of a managerial position and so had been assigned a Manager’s cabin, which had been so imaginatively designed by some good soul. The boundary walls were a couple of inches taller than the normal software engineer’s cubicle which made it perfect to follow the cricket matches in the manager’s cabin and have lively cricket discussions, so that a pleasant time could be had by all. And if my memory serves me right, the project we were working on was aptly named BAT, an apposite nomenclature, no not because it reminded you of the flying variety. And when Harbhajan squeezed out that winning run in Chennai to win India  the series, we left no one in doubt that some earth-shattering incident had occurred. For a moment we forgot that I was no Vice-President of the company sitting in a glass cabin. Enquiries inevitable followed as to what was the reason behind our building-shaking howls and shrieks, to which one of my imaginative team members offering such a straight bat that even Dravid would be impressed, said that those were whoops of delight in tackling a particularly troublesome RMI callback which had been giving us a headache for 2 days. That not only silenced the higher-ups, for they had no idea about RMI or callback (not that I had much idea either, I had to ask this straight-batter what it was all about, not that his explanation was of much help), but they were impressed too that we had cracked some rather tough technical problem.

I was brought back to the present by a rather loose comment from one of those EPL T-shirt wearing kids, something to the effect that Sehwag was useless and should be dropped. We, the generation who learnt cricket in the early 80s, can only tolerate so much. My blood boiled and I shot off my chair like Agni-III. I saw some sheaves of paper titled Quality Management Plan. I have never seen a document with that title, though part of every project’s document pile, being really used by anyone during my 13-year long software career. At last there is going to be some use now, I will shove it down the throat of this kid who was a blot on the cricket followers gang. As I grabbed the papers, a word shot out of them at me – Metrics. Which made me consider a particularly important metric – my would-be victim all of 6 feet and I, all of around 2.5 feet. My blood went back to cooler temperatures from boiling point and I went to the pantry for another cup of coffee.

The T20 Championship has opened the eyes of many. In its own way it has also shown up the limitations of the 50 overs format. The shorter format means that the sides are more evenly matched than in the 50 overs format. And in the event of a one-sided contest, the whole thing gets over in 3 hours ' it doesn’t drag on for a whole day.

Test cricket is the real deal. Nothing can match the charm of a test match with its ebbs and flows. And T20 seems to be the tool to bring in new fans. Where does this leave the ODI matches? In the trash bin. Well, not entirely.
It can still retain its place if:
1. The BCCI doesn’t organize a 7 match ODI series every month
2. Cricket Australia doesn’t organize a triangular tournament every year that runs for 2 months
3. ICC doesn’t insist on including the minnows in the world cup and have it run for 2 months

A real good tour would involve 3-5 tests, 3 ODI matches and a couple of T20 matches. Short and sweet. But ICC cannot be expected to be that radical. So the chances of the ODI matches being forced upon cricket fans will continue. But for how long? The T20, a format which the BCCI was fighting to keep out has taken the country by storm. Just look at the kind of interest it has generated in people who have never been interested in cricket. On the day of the final when India was playing Pakistan, everyone headed home early - eventhose who had never uttered the word ‘Cricket’. It was wonderful to see the fan base of our great game growing. What was even more heartening was the
fact that even when it was competing against the daily soaps on different channels, the women, who make up most of the soap viewership group, were not averse to preferring the T20.

The beauty of T20 cricket is that, unlike the other innovative formats that had cropped up over the years like Super Sixes and Max Cricket, there is absolutely no change in the rules under which this format is played.

The 50 overs format has a lot of limitations. The primary one being that a match could lose its competitiveness as early as the 30th over of the first innings. The very fact that ICC Technical Committee keeps on introducing new rules to inject artificial excitement in the ODI format is an acknowledgement that it is not such a great product after all. PowerPlays, SuperSub and what not. The best format will always be the one which doesn’t have artifical restrictions introduced.

Now that T20 has been such a great experience, it would be wonderful if the artificiality is taken out of the T20 format. T20 would be an even better product if the field restrictions are done away with. Let the bowlers breathe easy. Let the T20 follow the same rules as a Test Match when it comes to field restrictions and number of bouncers per over. It will not make the T20 format any less exciting.